Wednesday 20 December: It is possible to build more homes without destroying the countryside

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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509 thoughts on “Wednesday 20 December: It is possible to build more homes without destroying the countryside”

  5. Wordle 914 6/6
    Phew! – Just made it in 6.

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    1. Four here

      Wordle 914 4/6

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    2. Came together fairly quickly for me

      Wordle 914 4/6

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  6. The American Left can’t hide its hatred for Britain. 19 December 2023.

    By shelving talks over a free trade deal, Biden has confirmed all our worst fears about the Democrats.

    I don’t know that it is limited to the Democrats. There has always been a mutual antipathy between the two countries administations, though the greater part is probably on the American side which nurtures its revolutionary tradition. For such a vastly wealthy country the US is to some extent spiritually poverty stricken and holds its hatreds and resentments in perpetuity and that it was once subservient to the UK still rankles. The present love-in is a legacy of WWII and Roosevelt and Churchill’s alliance. It’s worth noting that even this was failing toward the end. FDR was to some considerable extent jealous of Churchill’s gifts and couldn’t help sticking it to him occasionally; most notably with his sucking up to Stalin behind the Prime Minister’s back. It is worth noting that Churchill did not attend Roosevelt’s funeral. A diplomatic admission of the profound but unspoken estrangement between them.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/12/19/the-american-left-cant-hide-its-hatred-for-britain/

    2. Our two countries already trade with and unset un each other on a massive scale. A trade deat would surely result in underming our high animal welfare standards. (Other frawbaks are available.)

      2. Keypad difficulties there, Joseph? I struggle when using my phone – thick finger syndrome…

    3. And in the last US presidential elections the MSM and PTB in the UK were keen to support the Democrats and rubbish Trump even though Trump was pro-UK and Biden, like O’Barma, hated us with an Irishly vitriolic loathing.

      I think it is now indisputable that the majority of our politicians and most of the MSM do not give a toss about what is best for Britain – they actually want to damage the UK.

    4. Any deal struck with the U.S.A will mean us getting the shitty end of the stick.

      The real reason it has been shelved is that it would expose the dire standards of American food. The last thing the corporations want is for their own people to start questioning the crap they ram down their throats daily.

    1. 379678+ up ticks,

      Morning B3,

      A new phoenix will arise in the shape of multi,multi, multi, row upon row of tower blocks, crossed sectioned with fly lanes for
      ELECTED politicians keeping, appeasement ,
      suppression, etc,etc, the order of the day, ticking over.

  9. Good morning all.
    A damp and drizzly start to the day with a slightly cooler 4°C on the Yard Thermometer.

  10. Russia makes fresh gains along entire front-line. 20 December 2023.

    Russian forces have advanced in Ukraine again as they continue attacks along the entire front-line.

    The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) think-tank confirmed Russian advances north-east of Kubyansk, north of Bakhmut and south-west of Avdiivka.

    Russia has seized the initiative on the battlefield in recent weeks and made a number of confirmed gains.

    Victory for Vlad! The sooner this war, that should never have begun, is ended the better for everyone involved.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/12/20/russia-ukraine-war-latest-news-front-line-attack-putin-live/

    1. About bloody time too.
      That the West ignored the Azov Brigade’s shelling of the Russophonic areas of the Donbass for so long was one of the main causes of Putin’s invasion.

        1. People also do not realise that the first assistance given to former Soviet states by the West was an influx of bankers and financiers to assist the former apparatchiks of the State in removing and money laundering funds that should have gone towards recovery.

  11. 379578+ up ticks,

    Morning Each,

    Wednesday 20 December: It is possible to build more homes without destroying the countryside

    No it isn’t, even inclusive of ALL the green belt,as it stands
    that statement is more fodder for fools, in regards to these Isles and as with medication, education, incarceration.
    there will Never be enough.

    All the time welfare is funding the “invasion” and the majority voter are funding the mass uncontrolled/ controlled immigration lab/lib/con coalition party, plus the WEF /NWO, there will NEVER / EVER be enough.

    To comply with the new WEF / NWO rulings via the polling stations will strengthen the saying “his number was up” that will mean just that, your allotted time via the race management office is over.

  12. ‘Morning All

    Lighter(if somewhat risky)Medley

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  13. A short gem on BBC R3 just now, Der Leiermann from Franz Schubert’s Winterreise with the singer actually accompanied by a hurdy-gurdy. Very nice!

    1. Such a sad song though. I know the words but I’d rather just listen to the German sounds and pretend I don’t know the meaning because it’s such a heart rending description of destitution.

  14. Why the EU is coming for Elon Musk. Spiked 20 December 2023.

    Ultimately, the content of the offending posts is irrelevant to Brussels. The purpose of its investigation is to establish the EU’s authority over online speech.

    It is no coincidence that the first full enforcement of the DSA has targeted X, even though disinformation can be found on all social-media platforms. The EU is going after Musk specifically because he is a vocal advocate of free speech.

    This is almost certainly true. The Political Elites of almost every branch of western governance are anxious to quash any ability of the serfs to speak freely.

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/12/19/why-the-eu-is-coming-for-elon-musk/

    3. All joking aside.

      Are you certain you didn’t accidentally ingest some muddy water when you fell?

    4. Good morning Bill,

      Sorry to hear you are not 100%.

      Moh and I have had a strange flu like bug , shivers , sneezing , coughing , runny nose , good news is that it is a 3 day nuisance , Moh is playing golf today, so he is suddenly better, than goodness.

      I am sure you will pick up soon . A mug of hot Bovril works wonders .

      Breezy cold morning , the washing line is full already, hope stuff will dry .

      1. Is it a ‘throat cough’ rather than a ‘chest cough’?
        There’s “a lot of it about”.

    5. Sorry to hear that Bill, stay warm and rest.
      I’m off to play in a care home today – another Xmas dinner!

      1. Good morning FA.

        Another Christmas dinner .. lovely.

        Like the shortage of loo rolls during Covid, now there is a shortage of turkeys.

        The birds have been pre booked on line , everywhere .

        1. We are having family round for a meal during the dead week between Christmas and New Year.
          One Very Firm request: NO TURKEY.

          We’re having slow cooked leg of lamb. Fine by me; I find turkey a pretty pointless meat.

          6. I would rather have a flask of coffee, a few sandwiches and a piece off cake and a walk on an empty beach with Pip spaniel before the tourists descend again .

            I say this every year.

            Moh WANTS a Christmas Turkey meal.

            What Moh wants , Moh will have .

        2. Back after a very wet 140 mile journey, A fun afternoon though
          Plenty of turkeys in Westminster – loo rolls? I have 89 of them…..you never know…..
          Morning BTW

        1. I’ve never seen such rain Sue and the storm doesn’t arrive until tomorrow
          Next gig Saturday 😘

  17. Good day all,

    Lovely dawn at McPhee Towers and it should be a nice day. Wind in the West 7℃≫9℃.

    One of the things I enjoy at Christmas and New Year is listening when I can to Milleniyule with Millenial Woes. For those who don’t know who Millenial Woes is he’s a Scottish fellow who is a part of the resistance to all things that are being done to us by our so-called leaders and representatives. Milleniyule 2023 is a series of live streams he does with other members of the resistance. In this one he has a chat with Gavin Boby, the Mosquebuster, who describes his awakening to the nature of Islam, its threat to us, how he started taking action to counter its spread by winning cases which denied planning permission for mosques and how he sees that the way out of it is in the collapse of the state which is our enemy.

    It’s not an easy listen, especially when he describes how the slammers go about the removal of native Britons from areas of our towns and cities, but it’s very interesting for anyone concerned about them.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/7e3d53b0a9f4d0ed84b3524d05552bc7b8ce2fc77c99b53f72ee23ec8d5d01b1.png

    https://odysee.com/@millennialwoes:4/MY2023GavinBoby:b

  20. Morning, all Y’all.
    Tiled bathroom floors with no underfloor heating… I’d forgotten how uncomfortable they are!

    2. Oh dear, what the Romans invented and we forgot .

      I guess your home in Norway is triple glazed and heated by what?

      We have no heating upstairs , five bedrooms .

      1. We have electric mostly, but a nice wood stove in both the living room and hallway downstairs.

    1. I finally discovered the missing box of good decorations today (it was – taDAH! – in the box room of all places!) so I finished decorating the tree. I stepped back to admire the effect and discovered Oscar had snuggled under the tree on the presents.

  24. Just Stoppit, I tell you

    Study: Humans Contributing to Global Warming by Breathing

    https://media.breitbart.com/media/2023/12/breathing-640×480.jpg

    A U.K. study found humans may be contributing to global warming by the simple – and necessary – act of breathing.

    Scientists affiliated with the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Edinburgh said methane and nitrous oxide in the air we exhale make up .1 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. The scientists found that, when accounting for burps and farts, humans are fueling alleged global warming by exhaling from their lungs.

    “We would urge caution in the assumption that emissions from humans are negligible,” the study’s conclusion stated.

    The study’s conclusion continued:

    We report only emissions in breath in this study, and flatus emissions are likely to increase these values significantly, though no literature characterises these emissions for people in the UK. Assuming that livestock and other wild animals also exhale emissions of N2O, there may still be a small but significant unaccounted for source of N2O emissions in the UK, which could account for more than 1% of national-scale emissions.

    The researchers did not find any connection between gases and diet.

    “Concentration enhancement of both CH4 and N2O in the breath of vegetarians and meat consumers are similar in magnitude. Based on these results, we can state that, when estimating emissions from a population within the UK, diet or future diet changes are unlikely to be important when estimating emissions across the UK as a whole,” the study explained.

    Breitbart News’s Thomas Williams reported in November the once prestigious Lancet medical journal claimed that the earth experienced the “highest global temperatures in over 100,000 years,” even though temperature data collection only began in the 19th century.

    The Lancet then later claimed climate change is the “biggest global health threat of the 21st century.”

    “Climate change mitigation is arguably the biggest preventive global health action possible — without effective mitigation, humanity will be unrecognisable by the time a child born today reaches old age,” the Lancet warned.

    https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2023/12/19/humans-contributing-to-global-warming-by-breathing-study/

    1. A hild would be unrecognisable… how? Humans won’t radically change. We’ll adapt, as we always have through technology. Oh, hang on. The Left want to stop us using tech to solve problems.

      What I worry about far more is that in 50 years time all the tools and tech we could have used to protect us from freezing cold will have been banned by happy clappy Lefty hippies.

      2. Good afternoon Wibbling and everyone.
        More important to worry about your child’s future employment prospects, if any. AI, robots, etc.

    2. I’ve had some dark thoughts reading the above. Globalists advocating for a massive cull of cattle, pigs etc. to reduce emissions and help save the Planet as well as many humans being labelled in some quarters as “useless eaters” are IMHO disturbing enough without a report identifying that human emissions are also being monitored.

  26. Comment from the BTL section:-

    A trans activist, a JSO protester and a Hamas Supporter had a competition to see who was the most virtuous. In the final event they jumped off Beachy Head to see who would hit the ground first. Who won?
    Answer: Society.

      1. Just what I thought.

        I wonder how safe these little girls would be if confronted by the rape gangs that we are not allowed to talk about?

        1. I doubt they would necessarily come into contact, they look (appearances can be very deceptive) like children with proper families rather than from care homes.

          2. All the more attractive to the young, male, fighting age Muslim gimmegrants that are pouring in.

        1. Barely literate young men, who have doubtless been told how easy the women in Britain are will be looking at this as a green light.

          I know I shouldn’t be stating such and that it leaves me open to similar accusations from the conclusion I draw. BUT the evidence so far shows that many of these “asylum seekers” start to pursue young women and girls within a short time of arrival.

  30. Please God, this new school guidance will be the beginning of the end of the trans lunacy

    Parents are giving a collective sigh of relief following publication of the Government’s common sense guidelines

    ALLISON PEARSON
    19 December 2023 • 8:03pm

    It’s very hard to know what the future will make of us. Will they judge us as harshly as today’s young puritans are minded to judge the past? Of one thing I think we can be pretty confident: the trans cult which possessed teenagers, mainly girls, in the first quarter of the 21st century will come to be viewed as one of the great aberrations. A historic mistake, a hysteria if you will, in which certain adults, acting for ideological reasons or because they were too scared to challenge the groupthink, aided and abetted the self-harm of children.

    The cost will be enormous, both in terms of the mental and physical health of individuals but also in the compensation the state will eventually have to pay to those who chose to have a mastectomy (or castration) and came to realise that they mutilated themselves with the permission of a psychiatrist.

    By trans cult, I don’t mean the relatively small number of adults who, having experienced gender dysphoria – “characterised by a severe and persistent discomfort in one’s own biological sex, which typically begins in early childhood” – went on to take the painful steps to change their bodies to bring them in line with who they felt they were. That is an entirely private matter and those people deserve nothing but kindness and respect. †

    What I am talking about is the quasi-grooming of impressionable and anxious youngsters to believe they were born in the wrong body, which has spread like a contagion. (Historically, gender dysphoria was found almost solely among small boys, but now it increasingly presents itself in white, adolescent girls in middle-class families.) Those young people are coached by online trans influencers to deliver an approved coming-out-as-trans script to their parents. If the poor parents don’t accept it, the teenager is told to cut their family off or use “the suicide tactics”. Basically, they are advised to threaten to kill themselves if Mum and Dad don’t agree to call them by their new name, use the correct pronouns and generally submit to the laughable idea that they are now a boy (or girl). That emotional blackmail usually works; parents are scared stiff.

    Like any cult, this one has a language of its own, and rules and penalties for those who get things wrong or, God forbid, try to leave. Non-trans or straight people are “Normies”. “Deadnaming” is the act of referring to a transgender or non-binary person by a name they used prior to transitioning. For obvious reasons, parents are often upset when their child tells them the name they chose for her/him at birth is now their “dead name”. But parents are not entitled to be upset. The only feelings that matter are the transitioner’s. Oh, and if your parents are Normies who won’t go along with you taking hormones, using chest compressors, or getting surgically altered, there are loads of trans stars and influencers online who are willing to become your new “glitter family”.

    How bad is all this? One nurse tells me that, at the NHS hospital where she worked until recently, they had a weekly theatre list for transgender girls having mastectomies. “All of them had issues such as autism, ADHD, bullying. One even told me she would never get a boyfriend as a girl. All had been seen at The Tavistock’s [gender identity] clinic. I always read their notes with some horror. Awful.”

    Yes, it is awful. Horrifying. As a society, we have barely begun to wake up to what should be called out as lunacy, but which people hardly dare whisper about for fear of being labelled transphobic. So parents and sensible teachers will have breathed a sigh of relief today after the Government, albeit rather belatedly, published Guidance for Schools for Gender Questioning Children, which recognised that the social contagion of “trans” is destabilising school communities and endangering vulnerable kids. Until now, some schools have taken it upon themselves to allow a pupil to socially transition without informing their parents. Teachers who have dared to question the gospel according to trans, and refused to accept a girl has become a boy overnight, have been rebuked and disciplined for “misgendering”. Madness which undermines adult authority.

    Kemi Badenoch, the minister who has pushed this measure through with characteristic tenacity and mental toughness, says firmly: “Parents should be included in all decisions relating to a child’s request to socially transition. No one loves children more than their parents and it is wrong to exclude parents from what can be a pathway to irreversible medical decisions.”

    Hooray, and so say all of us. Badenoch goes further, pushing back against the concept of gender identity itself. “The principle of biological sex is real. Sex is not ‘assigned’ at birth… No child is born in the wrong body,” she says. “Some children may not like their body and we should help them. But social transitioning is not a neutral act and should only happen in rare circumstances.”

    She’s right. An entire class of kids should not have to deny biological sex and call Katie Karl as if they’re an extra in The Emperor’s New Clothes. By going along with any change of name and pronouns, you actually make it more likely that Katie/Karl will progress to hormones and life-altering physical changes.

    Kate Barker, CEO of LGB Alliance, welcomed the guidance which asserts that a school’s legal responsibilities are framed by a child’s biological sex. “Gender identity ideology is, correctly, described as a contested belief rather than as objective fact,” says Barker. “We are especially pleased that the guidance specifically cautions that a young person’s growing awareness of their same-sex sexual orientation is sometimes assumed to be, or mistaken for, a ‘trans’ identity. LGB Alliance has long argued that children who might otherwise grow up to be happily lesbian, gay or bisexual are being told, at school, that an attraction to someone of the same sex may be an indication that they were ‘born in the wrong body’. We already know that the majority of teenage girls attending gender clinics describe themselves as same-sex attracted and that social transition, facilitated by schools, is often the first step towards irreversible drugs and surgery peddled by unscrupulous practitioners.”

    For some, the Guidance for Schools does not go far enough. Liz Truss said yesterday that it would be “exploited by activists and does not sufficiently protect children”. Truss, who is urging the Government to back her Private Members’ Bill, calls for a change in the law that would define sex as biological sex to protect single-sex spaces, stop schools formally recognising social transitioning and ban under-18s from accessing puberty blockers and hormone treatment.

    I agree with her. Activists from Stonewall and other gender-identity groups, who have been allowed to infiltrate our schools, are bound to fight this threat to their lucrative cult. One major obstacle to the guidance being followed is that many schools have themselves been schooled by Stonewall. Plenty are part of the Stonewall School Champions Scheme. Predictably, certain LGBTQ+ organisations are already calling on teachers to ignore the guidance – “a move that would harm LGB teens,” says Barker. “It is the clearest indication yet that the interests of LGB people and those who identify as TQ+ are in conflict.”

    At the very least, this guidance puts the UK at the forefront of the fightback against the indoctrination of children with fantastical theories and pernicious, family- and health-wrecking ideologies. A girl who lowers her voice with testosterone and grows facial hair also potentially ruins her fertility, her chance of breastfeeding or experiencing normal sexual pleasure. With a Labour victory almost certain next year, and all the crazies that will usher in, this was the last chance to lay out protections for millions of impressionable kids and to give parents peace of mind that their children aren’t being inducted into some sinister cult at school. Huge thanks are due to Kemi Badenoch, Miriam Cates and all on the Tory benches who stood up for sanity against cruel nonsense. From here on in, parents and grandparents must play their part against the cult; be vigilant, insist that the guidance is applied in your son or daughter’s class.

    No, we can’t be sure how history will judge us, but this feels like a hinge on the gate to the future. It is swinging in the right direction, and children are safer, at last.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/columnists/2023/12/19/new-school-guidance-beginning-of-end-of-trans-lunacy/

    † I think this is overstated, whether in early childhood or adolescence. The intervention of Kate Barker (“…children who might otherwise grow up to be happily lesbian, gay or bisexual …”) is unwelcome. Who says they might be happy in their aberrant state? Maybe many are pressured at a sometimes hormonally chaotic time. Ben Bradshaw won’t like to hear of any of this. His opposition to Andrew Bridgen’s Private Members Bill was that limiting the powers of schools in ‘transitioning’ [sic] might harm ‘gays’. It would only harm the recruitment drive of the likes of Bradshaw.

    Will Badenoch’s measure go far enough? Schools certainly should not be engaged in any of this. Their first duty upon observing this behaviour should be to inform the parents, not to encourage the child.

    1. But if teachers can still systematically refuse to stop corrupting children with their transgender agenda it will take a very long time to sort this out.

    2. Hospitals appear to be able to find all the staff needed to perform unnecessary mastectomies but are not able to find all the staff for other operations. Who sets the priorities?

    3. I think schools should concentrate on educating pupils and not brainwashing them with trans nonsense, nor trying to influence their sexuality. It’s quite normal for girls (and probably boys, too) to have a ‘crush’ on another girl, and certainly doesn’t mean they are gay. It’s just a passing stage of growing up. If they reach adulthood and decide they are gay, then that’s fine.

      I would support Liz Truss’ bill if I were an MP. No children should be drugged into thinking they are something they are not.

    4. I find it very worrying that the state has to legislate the primacy of the parent in this area. It is far, far too intrusive, far too aggressive in it’s desperation to control our lives.

  31. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-12872251/LAURA-PERRINS-mothers-revered-not-denigrated-Christmas.html

    Labour MP, Stella Creasy, complains that parenthood stops her ‘partying’! She describes having children as a Motherhood penalty. Should women like this be allowed to have children when they would far rather be out having a good (or probably bad) time ‘partying‘?

    She probably regrets having had a child and probably wants to subcontract all breeding out to Muslims in the future!

    1. Don’t worry Stella love. We will be sure to remind your children what you would have preferred to do rather than have to bear them. Selfish bint.

  32. Good morrow, Gentlefolk. today’s story

    Presidential Chatter
    Joe and Jill Biden were sitting in the White House one day when Joe says “Jill, do you realise that if this were a kingdom that I would be a king?”
    Jill says “You know Joe you’re pretty smart.”
    A few minutes later Joe says “And do you realise Jill, that if this were an empire that I would be an emperor?”
    And Jill says “Joe you get smarter every day. But, remember Joe, this is a country.”

  33. 379578+ up ticks,

    They are now putting bamboo into pate to bolster it up a bit,
    but they are not having me panda. to it, no way.

    Possible side affects, nine foot youth,with black eyes.

  34. My car got through the MOT & service ok yesterday but when it came back home there was still a dodgy headlamp. Took it back this morning and they said it was working when they did the test but they changed the bulb today anyway. Fingers crossed…….

    Now taxed from 1st January and legal for another year.

      1. They’ve given me good service for many years. Seems to have been an intermittently dodgy connection.

  35. Sanctions on Russian oil have failed. Were they ever meant to succeed? 20 December 2023.

    Last December, the European Union banned imports of Russian crude oil in a bid to starve the Russian war machine into submission over its invasion of Ukraine.

    A year later, the ban appears to have been a failure.

    The Kyiv School of Economics (KSE), which monitors Russian oil sales, estimates that Moscow will make $178bn from oil sales this year, rising to a potential $200bn next year.

    These amounts are lower than the record $218 bn Russia earned in oil revenues during the first year of the war, when Europe was still buying about half its oil exports, but they show that Russia has replaced that lost revenue remarkably quickly.

    It is worse than that; it looks as though they have damaged the West even more. Germany in particular is suffering. The sanctions on top of the US sabotage of the Baltic Pipeline has dealt them a savage economic blow. The real problem is that they are not world-wide. They are limited to American and EU lackeys. A new ban will come in over Christmas on Russian diamonds. It takes no great acumen to realise that they will simply be sold to the Global South and the resale value lost to the West.

    https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/12/20/sanctions-on-russian-oil-have-failed-were-they-ever-meant-to-succeed

    1. Why has Elsie blocked you? And why do you want to block Elsie (apart from being blocked yourself)?

      1. I have no idea why Elsie has blocked me. My blocking her is an attempt at humour. Which he obviously lacks.

  37. Woman throws dog off two-storey roof. 20 December 2023.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/1dc072e60d8c7bd42fdfbcea601491ff643dcdd0c70fe9eb8b5c7bf0d6402f27.jpg

    An Australian woman who was caught on camera throwing her dog off the roof of a two-storey carpark has been jailed for her ‘‘callous and cruel’’ crime.

    Princess the 10-year-old Maltese/shih-tzu cross was found on the ground near a Westfield shopping centre in Perth, Western Australia, by a member of the public who assumed the dog had been hit by a car.

    Obviously hanging was too good for her!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/12/20/australia-perth-woman-throws-dog-westfield-carpark-jail/

    1. Jesus!
      Poor wee dog.
      Bitch should have the same fate, with lots of warning to build up the anticipation

    3. I wish I hadn’t seen that, it has upset me no end – as I expect it has everyone else on here and every decent and right thinking people. Shih-tzus are affectionate little dogs and with a maltese cross even more so. Hanging is too good for the perpetrator.

  39. The lawfare against Donald Trump is increasingly farcical

    20 December 2023, 9:50am

    Does kicking a popular candidate off the electoral ballot protect democracy? Or is that in fact deeply anti-democratic?

    These are the questions that many Americans are pondering today after Colorado’s Supreme Court voted four to three to block Donald Trump from running in its state in the election next year, citing the insurrection clause in the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution.

    The ruling is a clear attempt to establish that Trump, by ‘inciting an insurrection’ on January 6, is persona non grata in American elections

    The court’s decision refers only to Colorado’s primary on March 5. But, if upheld, the ruling would almost certainly apply to the presidential election on November 5.

    Donald Trump is probably not going to win in Colorado — he lost comfortably in the state to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and to Joe Biden in 2020 — but that’s not the point. The ruling is a clear attempt to establish that Trump, by ‘inciting an insurrection’ on January 6, is persona non grata in American elections according to the Constitution. It could be used as a precedent to block Trump from running across America in 2024. Similar cases are making their way through courts in several other states.

    In their ruling, the Colorado justices wrote:

    ‘We do not reach these conclusions lightly. We are mindful of the magnitude and weight of the questions now before us. We are likewise mindful of our solemn duty to apply the law, without fear or favor, and without being swayed by public reaction to the decisions that the law mandates we reach.’

    That sense of solemn duty led the justices to do what no US court has ever done before and rule that an American citizen cannot run for the presidency under section three of the 14th amendment.

    To call that legally controversial is an understatement. Section three was written to bar secessionists from assuming political offices after the civil war. It states:

    ‘No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.’

    Donald Trump, as the 45th president, does qualify as an officer of the United States, having taken an oath to defend the constitution. Yet it is a matter of legal debate whether section three can be used at all, after Congress voted to ‘remove the disability’ under the Amnesty Act of 1872 and again in 1898. So the question of whether or not the section can be applied outside of a Civil War context — and in the case of Trump, to a president, who on January 3, 2020 was still in office – is a moot point.

    That’s before we even get on to the idea that Trump incited an insurrection on that fateful day in early 2020. It is worth noting on that count that the criminal indictment of Donald Trump over January 6, filed in Washington DC in the summer, did not include an insurrection charge — focusing instead on his ‘conspiracy to defraud the United States’ over the 2020 election.

    The Trump campaign will appeal the Colorado decision to the US Supreme Court and is confident that, with a six-three majority of conservative justices, the ruling will be overturned. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said he hoped the Supreme Court ‘will set aside this reckless decision’, which he described as ‘nothing but a thinly veiled partisan attack.’

    Senator Thom Tillis, meanwhile, has put forward the Help America Vote Act, which would penalise states for ‘misusing the 14th amendment for political purposes.’

    The Colorado justices issued a stay — or postponement — until January 4 to allow the US Supreme Court to decide the matter. If it is struck down, Democrat-led attempts to use the 14th amendment to bar Trump from the presidential election will probably all fail. But with 91 criminal charges hanging over him as we move into 2024, there are bound to be further legal attempts to restrict his campaign.

    The Democrats will keep claiming that they are saving democracy from a dictatorship. Republicans will keep accusing Democrats of tyrannically abusing the legal system. And the 2024 election will keep descending into a bizarre farce.

    So far, all such legal interventions appear to have helped Trump’s campaign, as his poll numbers keep rising. The people — who are meant to be ultimate source of authority in the United States — might not like Donald Trump, at least not by a majority. But it seems Americans dislike the lawfare against him more.

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-lawfare-against-trump-may-end-up-backfiring/

    2. And if we didn’t already know why they were so keen to depict it as a “resurrection” at the time (despite all evidence to the contrary), we do now

    1. Demokracja w pracy….

      On the other hand…..if the Muslipolitan perlice could close down the beeboids…..

  42. John Redwood MP’s speech in the e-Petition Debate in Parliament on the amendments to the International Health Regulations 2005 with intervention from Andrew Bridgen MP:

    John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con):

    I hope that the Minister will listen very carefully to the debate and the petitioners, because it would be a grave error were the Government to sign a treaty that gives away important powers over the future conduct of health policy. It is wrong to give to the WHO the sole power to decide when there is an emergency, and it is wrong to give away our powers of self-decision were such an emergency to be visited upon us.

    We are, of course, members of the WHO, and I think we all agree that we should continue to be members of the WHO. We should share our information; we should draw on its research, and it will draw on research and knowledge in this country, where there is much medical and pharmaceutical company expertise, and together, as collaborators, we may get to better answers in the future. However, it would be quite wrong to vest the power of decision in people so far away from our own country who are not in full knowledge of the local circumstances.

    Before any such power is vested in the WHO, there should be a proper inquiry and debate about how it performed over the course of the most recent covid pandemic. Why, for example, did the WHO seemingly concentrate on vaccines, rather than other methods of handling the problem? Why was there the delay or difficulty in testing existing drugs, which had already passed proper safety procedures and might have had beneficial or easing effects for those who got the condition? Why was more work not done on use of ultraviolet light behind the scenes in airflow systems, to clean up air when circulating? Why was more consideration not given to isolation hospitals and health centres, given that, unfortunately, quite a lot of the disease was spread through health premises. With the use of isolation, other healthcare could have continued during the course of covid treatment without so much cross-contamination within general hospitals. Why were there not recommendations and advice on isolation?

    Why was there not more careful consideration of whether it would be better to concentrate on ensuring that those who were most vulnerable were protected from the presence of the disease as much as possible, rather than trying to lock down whole populations and then having to make exemptions so that we could keep the lights on and some food could be delivered to people’s homes? There was something rather arbitrary about who was allowed to go to work and who was not.

    Why was more work not done by the WHO on cleaning up the data? We were given comparisons between countries, but when we looked beneath the data, we discovered that those countries were using very different definitions of what a covid death was. In individual countries, under the impact of the wave of the disease, there were often great difficulties in carrying out proper diagnosis of whether someone did have covid, or whether other medical problems that the person was suffering from were more likely to have caused the death. Some countries took a very tough line, saying that anybody with covid died of covid, even though they might have had lots of other conditions, so those countries had big figures, while other countries took a rather narrow view and said, “Well, this person was in their mid-80s and they were suffering from another a number of other conditions that might have led to the difficulties.”

    Andrew Bridgen:

    Does the right hon. Gentleman share my concerns that the WHO refuses to conduct any review of the recommendations it issued during the covid-19 pandemic, so sure is it that its advice and recommendations were absolutely perfect? If we sign up to these instruments, we will only get more of the same.

    John Redwood:

    That is one of my worries. We need more transparency, debate, discussion and challenge of those in the well-paid positions at the WHO, so that science can advance.

    As I understand scientific method, it is not choosing a limited number of scientists and believing everything they say; it is having a population of talented and able scientists who challenge each other, because then we get more truth out of the challenge and exchange of ideas. We do not want an international body saying, “There’s only one way to look at this problem or to think about it.” We need that process of challenge, and we need it to be an accelerated process. When we have an urgent and immediate need of better medicines, vaccines, procedures and approaches to lockdown or non-lockdown, that is surely the time for healthy debate, constant review and sufficient humility by all of us who venture opinions, because time and events could disprove them very quickly. If that happens, we should learn from the process and be honest about it, rather than saying that we were right all along and there was only one possible approach.

    That is all I wish to say, that I think we need much more accountability, exposure and proper debate. Yes, the WHO can make an important contribution and can be a forum for scientists, pharmaceutical companies and others who will be part of the solution should we get some future wave of infection, but please, Government, do not trust it with everything. Do not ensure that future Ministers are unable to act responsibly and well in response to public opinion and to medical opinion within our own country. Do not sell us short, because that would also sell the world short. This country has a lot to offer in these fields, and it will be best if we allow open debate, proper review and serious challenge.

    1. The main thing I heard from WHO at the beginning of COVID was Testing, testing, testing.

      What I hadn’t heard of until very recenntly was QALY – QUality of Life Years.and its importance when one is faced with limited years of life left for any reason.

      I asked my daughter, a community nurse prescriber who is charged with treating the housebound elderly, what the role of QALY was in care in the community.

      She told me that QALY didn’t feature in GPs interactions with patients but it was her job to assess how appropriate it was for a patient to adhere to a GP’s prescriptions.

      She told me of difficult and harrowing discussions that she needed to have with patients, who were inclined to be in tears, about what prescribed GP treatment options implied for their ongoing health. It meant that she could record their medical treatment options for a better quality of life in their remaining years. (e.g. refusing CPR that could result in painful chest injuries).

      Having been on a cardiac ward where a fellow patient met a traumatic death following resuscitation efforts I can appreciate that a QALY talk. from a qualified nurse at home is preferable to ending your years in hospital.

    2. I like what he says and would go further. We have been told that this “Treaty/Accord/Concord” or whatever it’s called will in no way remove the UK’s sovereignty in this area. However, it will be mandatory. Who is lying? Shades of joining the EU all those years ago. And that was a Conservative government too.

      The WHO will have complete control of all health matters and will be able to impose lockdowns, face masks, social distancing, stay at home and everything we endured with the scamdemic/plandemic.

      Well, not in my name.

      2. Remember the Great Windsor Sell Out?

        Sunak never told us the truth – that it was an abject and total surrender of Northern Ireland to the EU

        The current government must not be trusted one inch on anything.

    1. I’ve already told my MP in an email that I will not be voting for any candidate in any election who espouses climate change and net zero. I should have written “who will not campaign against the climate con and net zero “.

    2. I’ve already told my MP in an email that I will not be voting for any candidate in any election who espouses climate change and net zero. I should have written “who will not campaign against the climate con and net zero “.

  45. It’s the end of the line for Ukraine. 20 December 2023.

    RUSSIA is advancing on nearly all fronts in Ukraine, and the West’s armament deliveries have fallen 87 per cent in 2023 compared with 2022. There has been a 30 per cent fall in the supply of artillery shells of as the US diverted supplies to Israel. In Congress, Biden’s Democrats cannot get a $61billion package for Ukraine passed since the Republicans demand, as part of the total, sums for the existential crisis on the US’s southern border (where some 2million migrants are crossing yearly) and because Biden cannot say what the war aim in Ukraine is.

    Ukrainian losses amount to about 400,000 troops killed or missing while Russian estimated losses vary between 50,000 and 250,000, but figures are very unreliable. The Ukrainian ‘counter-offensive’ has been a disaster with Russia gaining more ground than Ukraine since it began.

    Even Nottlers need to read this. It has several eye openers that even we don’’t know about!

    https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/ukraine-war-disaster-and-uk-will-extradite-ukrainian-refugees/

  47. Well,well well

    The DT article doesn’t mention the measures taken,I fully understand why the bloody awkward question would be asked “If the French can do this why the bloody hell don’t we!!”

    What’s stopping us doing the same!!

    * No benefits for migrants for FIVE YEARS

    * Permits for illegal workers in sectors with shortages: REJECTED

    * No right to stay for those with criminal records

    * Fast track asylum system: REJECTED

    https://twitter.com/MartinDaubney/status/1737383836118335932

    3. Of course, the UK should impose tedious, time-wasting, restrictive rules for EU people wishing to visit the UK. Make them spend half an hour going through “checks”…. Especially for any EU employees…

      1. All French people entering the UK should be strip searched and thrashed. Have photos of their genitals posted online and made to hand over all of their money. Then denied entry for being French.

        1. Aw – Let them come in but make them take one illegal immigrant from France back, with them….

  49. – What is the betting that all these junior doctors are saying Happy Holidays this year instead of merry Christmas.

  50. Just passing through. Was able to eat a bit of lunch today – a couple of tranches of the MR’s Christmas terrine…..A meal in itself.

    The Grimes tells me that Bliar is the new Israel-Palestine “peacemaker”. Best of luck to both sides, I’d say….

    2. Glad you got something down. I could only manage lobster myself.
      May i ask what the terrine consists of…

        2. In answer to your question yesterday – NOTHING was swallowed or even tasted during my pot-holing adventure. And the “wash and allow to dry” suggestion for my gloves was exactly what the manufacturers advised the MR.

          1. Glad they weren’t ruined. I expect the string going up your arms and across your shoulders helped.

          1. Among other things. Minced pork; Minced pork sausage meat; chicken breast diced; allspice, S & P; dried pistachio nuts chopped; brandy. Line dish with parma ham. Wrap in foil; cook in bain marie for 1½ hrs min at 160º.

          4. Already got it. I was up most of the night. First time out in six months and i catch the lurgy. I’m never going out again. Too dangerous.

          5. I forgot to add: chopped dried cranberries. Another tip – which you will, of course, know, drain he liquid from the dish on removing from oven.

            Try Boots OB “Cold and Flu treatment” sachets.

          8. It’s very tasty, HG does an almost identical version, but with some chopped dried apricots in as well.

          9. Carolyn also added dried apricots – but declared that she could not detect them in the dish…!

          10. HG uses the brandy to soak the apricots. She also tries to ensure they are well spread out, because they have a tendency to clump together.

          12. I did wonder.
            She has a tendency to chop and change recipes to suit both guests’ tastes and what looks good on the shelves when shopping; as well as creating her own from scratch.
            She has always been a very keen cook and will experiment if she wants to surprise a guest with a new twist on an old favourite. I’m a good customer, as I will eat pretty much anything, so she doesn’t have to worry if the dry run doesn’t turn out as hoped, it won’t be wasted.

          13. We are both extremely lucky! I can cook perfectly well a limited number of attractive and moorish things. But the MR simply loves cooking and has endless patience and imagination. I used to feel guilty about her slaving away – but I know now that she is in seventh heaven!

          14. Like you I can cook, it’s my job to produce “comfort food”, tartiflette, fish pie, etc.

            She taught all our boys to cook and two have earned livings at it, one has even won awards.

          15. I would put half the mixture in the terrine than a layer of apricots and top with the remaining mixture.

          16. She often does that with things like asparagus or where she wants there to be a clear decorative layer demarcation on the plate when it’s served.

    4. Well, he’s been dead successful for the past 15 years.
      He has a vested interest in the Middle Eastern states remaining at war with each other.

      1. When a politician becomes as rich as Croesus just by being a politician you know they are rotten to the core. Why is this war criminal still at large?

        1. Nice picture of Miranda. I wonder if he still hangs about men’s bogs or has them delivered like Keith Vazeline.

        1. Nothing like putting a positive spin on things. You’re such a seasonal joy…Jingle Bells to you too!

  53. Rishi Sunak faces ‘boiler tax’ rebellion. 20 December 2023.

    Rishi Sunak is facing another major Tory rebellion over his plans to introduce a net zero “boiler tax” to railroad through the switch to heat pumps.

    No one should be coerced into buying these damn things. If they were genuine they would sell themselves. It wasn’t necessary for Ford to shoot all the horses so that people would buy his cars. This is a typical Marxist command economy where the politburo has had a brainstorm. We don’t need heat pumps or electric cars or any other stupid idea from Westminster. We can make up our own minds!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/12/20/rishi-sunak-faces-major-tory-rebellion-over-net-zero-boiler/

    1. He really is doing his job of making the Tories unelectable very well – obviously why he was chosen, although not by his party iirc.

      1. The more unelectable the Tories, the greater Labour’s majority. Labour will hasten net zero, encourage transsexual incursions into female-only spaces, increase net immigration, raise taxes, increase trade union powers, seek closer ties to the European Union, make reparations for slavery, make concessions over the Falklands and Gibraltar, strengthen ties between Northern Ireland and the Republic, devolve more powers to Scotland and Wales, apologise and make amends for entrenched white male privilege, and that’s just the first of at least two terms in office.

        2. Better than the current death by 1,000 cuts.

          The great reset might not be quite what the great re-setters are hoping for: the view of their feet from a lamppost might not be quite what they expect.

  54. My awards for 2023: from Michelle Mone to Harry and Meghan, it was a year of utter shamelessness

    May I present my ‘awards’ for the year, including gongs for ‘Abuse of the English Language’ and ‘Least Convincing Female’

    ALLISON PEARSON
    20 December 2023 • 1:00pm

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/columnists/2023/12/20/TELEMMGLPICT000360564811_17030673135210_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwfSVWeZ_vEN7c6bHu2jJnT8.jpeg?imwidth=680

    As 2023 weaves towards its end, like a drunk shushing noisily as he crashes through his own front door, we may start to ask what kind of a year it has been. To sum it up, we need look no further, I reckon, than the lingerie tycoon Michelle Mone.

    Since she persuaded panicking Cabinet members in 2020 that this brand new company she happened to know about had several million quid’s worth of excellent PPE (could it have been hastily refashioned from 36DD cups into masks?), Baroness Mone of Mayfair has maintained that she and her husband Doug Barrowman had no links to PPE Medpro.

    On Sunday, in an interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, the lady changed her tune. Mone said she was sorry she had lied to journalists, although, as apologies go, it lacked certain qualities generally considered useful in an apology. Contrition for starters. Mone was sorry, yes, but not sorry. Reporters had put her family through “hell” what with all those unkind and “defamatory” allegations that she was a pandemic profiteer. Funnily enough, that’s exactly what she is.

    Government contracts for gowns and masks worth £200 million, allegedly fast-tracked via a “VIP lane” to PPE Medpro, yielded profits of £65 million, of which £29 million somehow found its way into a trust of which Mone, Barrowman and their respective children are beneficiaries.

    She “wasn’t trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes,” Mone told the BBC, a Rapunzel cascade of inappropriately perky curls hanging about her poker face. Heavens, no! She had not told the truth about her connections simply to protect her family from press attention. That must be it. Besides, as she insisted, what she had done, “is not a crime”.

    Mone has some brass neck. Or, perhaps, that should be bras neck? Never shy of getting her boobs out to flog her Ultimo undies range, this time she donned the penitential black blouse of victimhood.

    A National Crime Agency investigation into allegations of fraud and bribery in relation to the PPE Medpro contracts is ongoing (Mone and Barrowman deny wrongdoing), but it seems that, while millions were being enjoined to make sacrifices for the national good, a grasping, well-connected few were making millions from PPE for their own good. It may not be a crime, but it’s pretty repellent.

    Following her non-apology apology to “clear my name”, Mone activated the Nuclear Fire-Sale option, attempting to drag senior Tories down with her. She claims that the Cabinet Office, which Michael Gove led at the time, the Government and the NHS “all knew about my involvement from the very beginning”.

    Even squeaky-clean Sunak has not escaped a sarcastic jibe on Twitter (now X) about how much money the Prime Minister would make from his old firm’s investment in vaccine manufacturer Moderna. I fear the “If you think I’m bad, how about them?” defence may not be quite as persuasive as the Baroness thinks.

    A former Tory party donor emailed me yesterday to suggest that Michelle Mone should be given the Opportunistic Grifter of the Year award. I emailed back to point out it was a strong field and her victory would hardly be a shoo-in.

    The woman is literally shameless, yes, but in 2023 lacking shame became an established PR strategy. If you act like you think you’ve done nothing wrong and play pass-the-blame parcel then maybe the world will be stupid enough to buy it.

    There was a lot of shamelessness about in the past 12 months, and other conduct that made you want to hurl the remote at the television.

    So, here, in no particular order, are my “awards” of the year (do let me know what yours would be).

    Political Party Hellbent on Extinction award
    A truly outstanding performance in this category from the Conservatives. Not content with dismaying their voters by reneging on almost every commitment in the 2019 manifesto, Tory “moderates” doubled down this week, warning that the party risked falling into the hands of “extremists” who supported actual Conservative policies.

    More than 20 MPs, half of them former ministers, warned that groups like the New Conservatives with their support for low immigration and strong borders risked creating the damaging perception that the Conservative party was “right wing”.

    In fact, Conservatives “make up quite a small minority of the Conservative party,” reassured one liberal centrist.

    Highly Commended: Rishi Sunak for waking up to the fact that record net immigration figures of 745,000 were unpopular with people who voted for immigration to decrease, not double.

    But only after sacking Suella Braverman, the minister who kept telling the PM the Government must drastically cut the number of incomers, and was ignored. At this rate, the Tories will be lucky to hold on to 100 seats at the general election. Well done, everyone!

    Least Convincing Female award
    Isla Bryson, who claimed to be a transgender woman, was called Adam Graham when he raped two actual women. Bryson was charged in 2019 and began transitioning in 2020 which, conveniently, allowed him to be remanded to a women’s prison to await sentencing.

    The case caused justifiable horror and spurred the Westminster government to use Section 35 of the Scotland Act to block the Gender Recognition Bill, which would have removed the requirement for a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria. It also – hallelujah! – marked the beginning of the end of the reign of Queen Nicola Sturgeon.

    Isla Bryson, formerly known as Adam Graham, at the High Court in Glasgow in January CREDIT: Andrew Milligan/PA
    The story highlighted the cunning of male predators and the way transgenderism can cynically be used to access vulnerable women’s spaces. Bryson’s decision to wear tight red leggings to court was extremely helpful. His actual sex was all too apparent. Lycra cannot lie.

    Most Racist and Sexist Diversity award
    Aviva or more specifically, Amanda Blanc, the chief executive of the insurance firm, told a Parliamentary committee that all senior white male recruits must get a final sign-off from her as part of a diversity drive. “There is no non-diverse hire at Aviva without it being signed off by me and the chief people officer,” she said proudly. Proof, if any were needed, that the only person it is now safe to discriminate against is a white man.

    Blankety Blanc’s obliviousness to the borderline legality of her admission – is being an Anglo Saxon bloke not a “protected characteristic” under the Equality Act? – confirmed the pernicious hold that DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion) has over institutions which used to hire people according to, you know, how good they might be at the job. Not their skin colour or genitalia.

    One despairing City boss I spoke to said of one newly-graduated lad: “Alex is personable, articulate, highly numerate, literate with a great degree and he’s white. He is literally at the bottom of the list of people my firm would hire right now.”

    So-called “diversity hires” were causing chaos in his business, the man told me, because their written English was so poor the firm’s clients thought they were getting spoof emails from a Nigerian prince. Let’s hope white men, who must form a significant part of Aviva’s client base, treat Amanda Blanc as she treats them. Go woke, go broke!

    Abuse of the English Language award
    The BBC. The corporation’s stubborn refusal to call the terrorist organisation Hamas a terrorist organisation after the heinous massacres of October 7 brought anger and despair as well as allegations of political prejudice.

    A survey last week revealed that 80 per cent of Jews felt less safe in the UK than before the attacks in Israel two months ago. The poll found a collapse in confidence in British institutions, with half saying they trusted the police less than before the attacks and 64 per cent saying they had lost confidence in the BBC. Hardly surprising. Language matters.

    Moral equivocation in the face of such evil was disgusting. It may have encouraged the gullible to join those pro-Palestine marches that became such an unwanted, disturbing feature of weekend life in London. Personally, I’m still reeling from hearing Radio 4’s Today programme refer to the hostages, who were brutally snatched and incarcerated by Hamas, including small children and a baby, as “detainees”.

    The Gary Lineker Award for the Most Self-Congratulatory and Obnoxious Opinion on Any Given Subject award
    Gary Lineker.

    Worst Public Inquiry award
    Covid. If you haven’t booked to see a Christmas panto, never fear, there’s always Lady Justice Hallett’s thigh-slapping Whitehall farce. Only with us for five months so far, the Covid Inquiry has already eaten up £70 million of public money.
    Around £750K a day on barristers and solicitors is surely money well spent. It’s not as if we could use it for school catch-up programmes or to help the million or so children with mental health problems caused by lockdown, is it?

    Fall about as the KC to the Inquiry, Hugo Keith, entertains us with his amusing grasp of herd immunity!

    Gasp as perfectly sensible questions about the origins of the virus and devastating trade-offs are ruled out and scientific “experts” who got almost everything wrong are lauded! Try not to get annoyed when one of the bereaved says how upset she is that her mother died of Covid. And then reveals her mother was 92. (Yes, NINETY-TWO.)

    The inquiry could, of course, wrap up early. It could conclude that lockdowns do not have much effect on the spread of a virus and that Covid really wasn’t Ebola; more like the flu wearing hobnail boots. Oh, and the UK is stony broke, so we could never afford another lockdown anyway. But where’s the fun – and the dosh for lawyers – in that? This one will run and run. Could it be time for a public inquiry looking into why we are so bad at public inquiries?

    For God’s Sake, Please Make it Stop! award
    The Duke and Duchess of Sussex. A tricky year for Harry and Meghan reheating their Royal grievances, scraping the crusty burnt bits off the bottom of the pan, to keep the millions flowing into Montecito.

    Attention-grabbing lowlights include a “near-catastrophic car chase” which doesn’t actually seem to have taken place. Or not the chase bit anyway. And then there was Harry explaining on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert about his “frost-nipped todger”. Eeuw!

    The publication of the Prince’s autobiography, Spare, was supposed to elicit sympathy for Harry’s tragic childhood, but failed because it was a whingefest by a man-boy who is still moaning that, aged eight, he got the worst bedroom in Granny’s castle. Hardly Oliver Twist. Is there anything more unappealing than a Royal who turned his back on duty and gives a tone-deaf account of his massive, unearned privilege?

    The book backfired. The reliably woke New York Times started describing the Sussexes’ remorseless, calculating lament as a “whingefest”. Even Harry’s recent victory in the civil courts over phone hacking by the Mirror Group was pretty much cancelled out when The Hollywood Reporter listed the semi-adjacent Royals among the biggest losers of 2023 for their “whiny Netflix documentary, a whiny biography (Spare – even the title is a pouty gripe ) and inert podcast”.

    If the idea was to make it big in America and set up a rival court to William and Kate’s, that ship has hit the rocks. Thawing relations with His Majesty the King may prove more difficult, I suspect, than defrosting the todger.

    ***************************************************************

    John Galt The First
    1 HR AGO
    Allison, you missed a couple of awards: –
    Worst Banker of the Year Award: –
    Goes to Alison Rose who will tell any journalist how much you have in your bank account if you don’t agree with her political views. (Andrew Bailey comes a close second for ‘being out to lunch’ when interest rates needed raising)
    Worst Government Spending Award:-
    Goes to Nichola Sturgeon and the SNP for two ferries which will cost approximately £175 million pounds each instead of the £45 million costs initially budgeted for. Also running 3 years late.

    J McMenemy
    1 HR AGO
    Award for the Most BP raising decision by the Met Police (a crowded field):
    Mr Attiq Malik , chairman of London Muslim Communities Forum, who was invited to observe the Metropolitan Police’s response to protests from the force’s operations room in Lambeth, south London, during the Palestinian marches. Senior officers in the operations room, overseen by the “gold commander” responsible for policing each march, were making decisions about whether particular chants or behaviour constitute criminal offences.
    So they chose to be advised by Mr Malik, who is a hard-left activist and was filmed leading chants of “from the river to the sea” at a pro-Palestinian rally.
    According to the DT, Mr Malik’s position as chairman of the body is not publicised by the Metropolitan Police & apparently they do not routinely vet advisers.

    1. ‘Mr Malik’s position as chairman of the body is not publicised by the
      Metropolitan Police & apparently they do not routinely vet advisers’.

      Of course they don’t. Anyone and their granny can just rock up to the control room to give their opinion.

      The Met Police are not just being disingenuous they are outright fucking liars.

          1. I was thinking its a good job you’ve got an unusual front door (don’t want to give the game away…)

  56. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/12/20/rishi-sunak-faces-major-tory-rebellion-over-net-zero-boiler/

    If heatpumps were so good, people would buy them in preference to a boiler. They’re not, so big fat state has to force it. That’s all this is, another tax to force a Left wing attitude.

    Frankly, these people should be taken outside, flogged, flayed and forgotten. They are scum. The truly terrifying thing is, the economy, people’s income will all collapse if this communist green idiocy continues – and Labour will make it worse. It has got to be stopped.

      1. I’ve had all the COVID jabs but passed all the blood tests at my last health check except the blood platelet count. Despite a recount I was given an NFA (no further action) decision. I haven’t had a troponin leakage test that could possibly be a predictor of pericarditis but I’ve had so many adverse side effects from GP treatments that I’ve concluded WTF.

        I bought an EV because, like Elon Musk, I find the amazing acceleration from 0 to 60 mph more exciting than its top speed of over 100 mph. It can out accerate a Range Rover but not the top spec Tesla.

  57. Well, I must assert myself (aka throw a wobbler) more often.
    From initial request letter (with relevant medical details) until an actual ‘batch’ prescription was issued has taken three months.
    At root, were too many cooks in too many linked GP practices not communicating with each other. The receptionist I last dealt with muttered “well, there are lot of people doing things” which confirmed my fears; each jobsworth doing his/her job in their own little mental cell; tunnel visioned and unable to take in a wider picture. (I admit to behaving like a fierce nanny and pointing out that I’d been with the practice for nearly 60 years and I’d never known it to behave like this before.)
    The upshot is that instead a 6 month batch prescription, I now have a 12 month one. My son told me it was to give the surgery a year’s break from my visiting the place.
    As long as I get what I want, I don’t care if doctors are hiding under their desks in their locked offices when they see me hove into view. I had asked politely, well in advance; given relevant information; supplied extra information when requested. How difficult is it for the “prescription team” (HAH!) to do their bloody job? How many other patients give so little trouble (I avoid the place like the plague) and supply tabulated readings when requesting prescriptions?
    (End Of Rant!)

    2. Just to rub salt in the wound; my GP contacts me to check all is well, if I haven’t been to see her in over six months.

      1. My Practice has amalgamated with two others. There are now in excess of 40,000 patients on their books. A very nice earner for the company that runs them. Especially when the waiting rooms are always empty.

    3. Good for you. I am having similar problems with too many GP’s thinking the others are dealing with it. My next complaint to the practice is going to be cc’d to the CQC.

      1. Well done. I thought of you as I took from 9th. September to 19th. December to get a coherent response out of the ‘teams’ milling around in these establishments. And that was for just one item!

        1. It annoys me when they say what can i do for you? If they had read my medical record they would know !
          The GP who sent me to hospital with a suspected heart attack didn’t even have her computer switched on.

          2. The GP who didn’t send me to hospital spent all his time looking at the computer – it was switched on!

            I showed him a nocturnal blood oxygen level recording I had taken the previous night showing the sentinel signs of impending heart failure and he declined to keep me as his patient.

          4. You may well be right.
            I was able to discuss my nocturnal high resolution SpO2 record analysis with the author of an overview paper on the precursors indicative of heart failure.

          5. If not rule one in life, it is pretty close to the top…
            Never let your opponent see your hand.

          6. This a card he was not even prepared to look at so he had no idea how potentially serious the drugs he had prescribrd for mr may have been.

            My only option in that circumstance was for me to prove that I could recover after a complete washout (the accepted medical term for withdrawing from all medication – there could be a fatal risk in suddenly doing that but, if I remained alive, I would have proved my point).

          7. No surprise there. When discussing my symptoms my Oncologist said to me to answer questions he had asked.

    4. Envy of the World, eh?

      What gets me (among other things) is when they tell you that no appointment is available for three weeks they end by adding – “If things get worse do get in touch with us straightaway”…..

      2. Is there just a scintilla of a chance that a segment of surgery hours, set aside for urgent cases, is not available for routine appointments?

        1. There’s a 100% chance that a segment of surgery hours, set aside for urgent cases, is not available for routine appointments

        2. There is – but it is THEIR decision whether your deadly illness is “urgent”….ad generally one sees only a nurse or “assistant”.

          2. True – I exaggerated. I meant medical issues that were causing great anxiety to the patient. As in my case last month when I was told by the eye-clinic that my BP was so high I should go to the GP immediately – and was told by e-mail that the first available apptmt was ten days hence BY PHONE….

          3. I was being a little flippant about 111, which is for worries more serious than routine but less than urgent or life-threatening.

          4. It will be by the time you’ve spent 3 hours on the phone and then it’s too late to attend A&E….

      3. Please call at 8.am at the same time as everyone else for an appointment. At 8.am and 30 seconds no more appointments are available. Liars.

      5. Please would somebody help me fill in the missing names and correct my errors?

        l to r

        Michelle O’Barma – Bill Clinton – Hilary Clinton – Trudeau – Trump – O’Barma – Schwab – Biden – Blair ? – Netanyahu – Gates – Cameron & Pig) – Woman in veil? – Idiot King – Soros – Jordan Peterson? – Douglas Murray?

        4. Bearing in mind the characters portrayed are figments of Mr Moran’s imagination, I think the veiled person might be a reference to a Hamas Fighter… There seems to be a religious figure in the background too….

        6. Are you saying that Mrs Obama is transitioning to a male? And I only see a single Biden, Richard.

        1. I know they are merely cartoon caption competition winners, but they are Christian Adams signed originals and I believe they may be unique, I wonder what Stig’s are worth, I believe he has a few.

  60. A slow-burning Par Four.

    Wordle 914 4/6
    ⬜🟨⬜⬜🟨
    🟨⬜⬜🟨🟨
    🟩🟩🟩⬜⬜
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    2. Me too.

      Wordle 914 4/6

      🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜
      ⬜⬜🟩🟨⬜
      🟩⬜🟩⬜⬜
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    4. Just back from an extremely busy pub (not complaining), and will Wordle in a state of inebriation.

  63. That’s me for today. Still feeling rough. That I have no desire for a glass of wine is always a clue that all is not right!

    I doubt I’ll go to t’market tomorrow: indoor staff will do the needful. Just hope the lurgy dissipates b the weekend.

    Have a jolly evening

    A demain – possibly.

        1. What’s more, your taste buds will be impaired, spoiling any enjoyment of the wine and, effectively, wasting it. Fingers crossed that the worst will have passed in the next couple of days.

          1. It is “wasted” anyway, Stig. I no longer have any sense of taste (or smell). But when in what passes for normal health, I enjoy the effect the wine has!

          2. That’s most unfortunate. Food and drink must now be more a necessity than a pleasure, although I accept that wine must still be more enjoyable than water, even if they taste and smell rather alike.

            As an aside, I’ve been having a fad for Bovril beef tea. I don’t know what brought this on but I’ve been finding it unusually satisfying of late.

          5. It is “wasted” anyway, Stig. I no longer have any sense of taste (or smell). But when in what passes for normal health, I enjoy the effect the wine has!

        3. How about a “hot toddy” of hot milk with a spoonful of honey and a good slug of whiskey or brandy, Bill? It might help you get a decent night’s sleep. I hope you have a restful good night’s sleep.

  64. It is interesting to compare the way Israel is being lambasted for their response to a terrorist attack that killed close on to 2000 citizens, with the GW Bush response to a terrorist attack that killed about the same number of citizens.

  65. Is there such a thing as a 36-hour cold? I woke up yesterday morning with a runny nose, watering eyes and sneezing attacks, and began working my way through a box of tissues. Now, it has almost passed and I’m feeling a little guilty. I was supposed to visit my niece today but, fearing I might spoil her Christmas – hers last year was ruined by a bad cold – I sent a text message yesterday suggesting we reschedule it, which she was happy to do. It now turns out not to have amounted to very much.

    1. Probably just a mild irritation of the nasal passages which has now cleared up. They are very common.

      1. Mr Wainwright isn’t common…

        He’ll have had covidenza and shaken it off like the manly man that he is…

  67. Today has been useful .

    Breezy drying day.. towels face clothes , tea towels dried on the rotary line .. then it started drizzling with rain at 2pm .

    I investigated the contents of the chest freezer in the garage .. we also have a large upright .

    OMG, the chest freezer had some shocking surprises. I gathered together 4 large shopping bags and sorted through the contents of the chest freezer .. the top layer were recent purchases , but I felt like an excited geologist because the lower down I sorted the more shocks there were in ice age terms .. I went back down to 2016.. stuff I hadn’t seen for years, frozen duck necks for dogs , fish mixtures for fish pie , runner beans ( our own ) lamb chops , sausages , mushrooms , beef mince , ice cream , blackberries , packets of frozen pastry , frozen curry , green looking chicken breasts and much more … and a huge leg of pork at the bottom …. very green and frozen .

    What a terrible waste of food and unredeemable .

    Moh was playing golf and out of territory , so I was able to pop Pip in the dog cage in the rear of the car for a walk later , wrap up warm , bung the 4 bags into the car and toddle off to the tip with the load , wondering how the guys at the tip would react …. no problem , they helped me put the frozen stuff in the waste food bin . Thumbs up to them .

    Called into RSPB Arne for a bag of bird food , lots of chattering bods with huge binocs/ cameras strung on shoulders , birds/ waders plentiful on the upper reaches of Poole harbour , I was pleased to hear .

    I gave Pip a walk on Nat trust land at Stoborough, what a mess the hairy pigs have made of the heathland and grassy areas , ruined .

    After my walk with the dog, I called into a place and asked them to reserve me a small fresh hen turkey, deposit paid , small mortgage but Moh will be pleased he will be having a proper Christmas meal .

    Arrived home.. and then other things , feed Pip, cup of tea, and then Moh’s car was fixed and Mot sorted !

    Peace and quiet and no panic so far!

    2. I’m still eating stuff that’s older than that – I do check it carefully though before consuming

      1. I’m with you, Spikey. I use visual and sniff checks – after thawing – for frozen food past its use-by date. There’s a good deal of caution in advised storage periods for frozen food – or cupboard food, come to that. They clearly don’t want purchasers going down with food poisoning, from both legal and image perspectives. More cynically, they won’t complain if customers throw away edible food and needlessly purchase replacements.

        1. Some of the contents of outr freezer are probably just as old – while edible, thinggs do lose their texture and flavour rather if kept too long. I can feel some curries coming on in the new year.

    3. We defrost the freezers annually, so that’s when the older stuff gets pushed into the “eat me” drawer.
      Nothing is older than a year.

      The spice racks and pantry on the other hand….

      1. I try to defrost annually. I wait for a sub-zero night, wrap all the freezer contents in newspaper for extra insulation, then put it all in big plastic boxes, take them into the garden, put a weighted lid on them and turn off the freezer. If the night is cold enough for long enough, the freezer de-ices before any food has thawed. We had such a night late November, so it’s all done for a year or so.

    4. I have six large lidded plastic boxes in the bottom of my freezer, stacked in threes. On top of the filing cabinet, alongside, I have a small exercise book into which I write the contents of each box and the dates of foodstuffs places therein. Other, smaller, containers with single-portions foods like home-made soups, stocks, chillis, curries, and other items sit in stacks in the middle of the freezer floor. Other items are on a shelf and in the long baskets above. My system works.

      I’ve just been in there, coincidentally, and taken out a Texas-style chilli (made in September) for my dinner tomorrow.

      I started doing this after I’d visited my mother’s freezer, a few years back when she was still alive, and sorted it out for her. It was in a worse state than yours and had repeated items of foods going back well over a decade.

      2. Which shelf/shelves do use you use for storing the specimens from your career, like those in the “black museum”?

    5. One of life’s great mysteries is the permanent presence of loose peas in a freezer. They have a life of their own.
      I swear blind that if you never, ever bought a pack, when it comes to mucking out a freezer, little green blobs will be rolling around at the bottom.

      1. Could they be dehydrated sprouts instead? Give them a few years lurking at the bottom of the freezer and who knows what they will turn into

      2. I’ll let you know if I find some – peas are are one veg I never buy, except mange tous or sugar snaps.

  68. All these big corporations now wanting to employ fewer white men and quite openly legally discriminate against them based on the colour of their skin, I wonder if this is what Enoch was alluding to when he made the prophesy that one day immigrants would be holding the whip hand?
    Was he just making a wise factual statement and not being racist at all?
    Personally I don’t think it is immigrants that are holding the whip hand, I think it is the forces of globalism and these initiatives are emanating from the WEF, the WHO , UN and global corporations trying to reset the planet and enrich themselves from the chaos that will ensue.

  69. Evening, all. This afternoon I took a quick trip into Mogadishu as my local North Shropshire town has become. I’ve never seen so many non-Salopians. What with them and the beggars (including the muslim Big Ishoo seller) I don’t recognise the place I’ve lived near for the last forty years. As for the headline, words fail me! Where are they going to put them? In the middle of the North Sea might have less impact on the countryside, it’s true, but I can’t see them doing that. I am sick of the quangos etc banging on about “climate change” when they are concreting over green fields, grubbing up mature hedgerows and chopping down substantial trees. Then the nutcases whinge about not meeting their “net carbon/carbon zero targets”! The whole lot of them need to be handed their P45s. The latest madness I’ve had to suffer is the Met Office asking me to sign up to seminars on “hazards in winter” (including cold weather, snow, ice, floods) and “hazards in summer” (such as heatwaves, drought, hot weather). Inevitably, there was also the “climate change” seminar as well. It makes me feel like taking a machine gun to the lot of them! It is, frankly, insulting to the intelligence of someone who has lived through 1976 and the winter of 1982 and who, moreover, received proper science training in chemistry, physics and biology before Blair wrecked education for ever.

      1. I should imagine most Nottlers would be members of the properly educated club (and most will have lived through the same events).

      1. It was when I was at home, but ’82 was bitter in North Shropshire – it killed my privet hedge!

      2. ’63. The year commences with winter an ends, save a few days, with autumn,

        That cold snap lasted from From Boxing Day 1962 (five days till the end of the year) right up to mid-March 1963.

        1. Not of a camel, I wouldn’t 🙂 I last rode a camel when I crossed the Gobi on a ship of the desert.

          2. Yes. He was called Cha (means “yellow” apparently). I was riding across the desert on a camel. I did it to raise money for horse welfare. I also rode a horse while I was in Mongolia, but mainly it was a camel. We had some interesting times camping in a blizzard.

    2. If it were a horse would we be as surprised? I’ve walked Mongo and a few times people have stopped to ask if he’s a bear.

    4. I was outside my brother’s house in the car when a man walked past with a pig in a harness, just like taking a dog for a walk. Apparently, he is well known locally.

    1. Great that should take the pressure off A&E….I seem to recall that surgeons at KIng’s College Hospital, Denmark Hill, South London from the late 1970’s onwards became very proficient in dealing with stab wounds….

      1. Was it Musgrave Park in Belfast that became dab hands at rebuilding knees and elbows shattered by punishment shootings by the IRA and Prod gangs?

    4. I glanced at the headline and imagined that the cupboard was some sort of reinforced wardrobe in which householders could shelter.

  73. Christmas is cancelled. Everyone is ill, at varying stages. Younger son and his little family, as well as having the current fluey virus, have also had a D&V bug this week.

    2. Oh , pm

      So sorry , all the preparedness has gone to pot .

      When the boys were younger and Moh’s parents were alive , a Christmas went to rack and ruin .

    3. Oh heck. That is awful; weeks of careful preparation and anticipation killed stone dead.
      I wonder how many Christmases we’ve all experienced where at least half the guests would rather be curled up in bed?

      1. My catastrophic Christmas was in 1979. I was taken into hospital in the early hours of Boxing Day with meningococcal septicaemia. (Our family doctor came out at one in morning – those were the days.) Mum and Dad were still there to look after me then though. Two weeks in the hospital but five in total off work.

        1. Sue

          What a lucky girl you were to recover from such a terrible disease .

          You must have been a strong lass with the help of some good doctors .

          1. The hospital doctors told me they’d just treated the symptoms and didn’t know how I’d survived. Within a few hours of being admitted, my right knee was the size of a football. They punctured it and drained off the fluid but warned me that inevitably some would remain and harden, which definitely happened. The knee took at least a year to get back to normal. Samples of the fluid were sent to the lab and they identified the bacteria. The ibuprofen pills were the size of bullets and very difficult to swallow. Meanwhile, I read War and Peace.

          5. The nurses used to joke about the book and check my progress. Distalgesic tablets for the pain, as well as ibuprofen. I just looked up the spelling and learned that distalgesics are no longer used. It was effective so I wonder why.

          6. Perhaps that is the reason..! Those were the days indeed. So glad you survived to tell the tale and to tell us.

          7. Too many related deaths.

            Why was distalgesic withdrawn?

            Co-proxamol,
            also known by the trade names Distalgesic, Cosalgesic and Dolgesic, is
            involved in between 300 and 400 deaths every year. About a fifth of
            those are accidental, sometimes involving alcohol. There has been
            concern about the dangers of the drug in overdose for decades.31 Jan 2005

        3. There was one Christmas when I left all of my gift buying until Christmas eve and then went down with a stinking cold/flu that knocked me out for several days.

      2. I spent Christmas 1972 in bed – a bout of flu like I’d never had before or since – I was young, so I survived but it was nasty – and I had a second wave of it in January. We were staying with my Mum – in her back bedroom, which was always rather damp, all three of us in there. I eventually sweated the infection out but it’s not something I’d want to repeat in a hurry.

      3. Or where the hosts/hostesses wish they were curled up in bed and not ministering to their guests….

    4. I picked up my brother-in-law from hospital on Friday and took him for a medical appointment on Monday. He told us yesterday that he has tested positive for Covid (undoubtedly picked it up in hospital). We are now waiting to see if my wife or I develop Covid over the next few days, in which case our Christmas plans to spend it with our two daughters and 6 grandchildren will be blown out of the water.

    5. Best you go to church then, and pass it on far and wide.
      It’s what everyone around here seems to do.

      I cannot recall the last time I didn’t catch something foul at the Christmas day service!

      One year I ended up in the intensive care unit with pneumonia, another year I was floored by ‘flu, another year I caught Covid
      a standard cough and cold was a really good result.

    6. Sorry to hear that. Despite half a dozen relatives (all with cold symptoms) staying with us for the best part of last week, touch wood (No sos/ Phizzee that’s not an invitation to comment) I seem to have escaped Scot free (so far). [ Although I do recall one year having a nasty bout of bed confining flu from Christmas Eve for several days thereafter – so I’m owed one Christmas!]

      1. It’s not the first time. Neither, I am sure, will it be the last. We have been known to have ham sandwiches for Christmas day lunch because we didn’t feel well enough for anything else. Oh, and with a sprig of holly on the top for that festive feel!

      1. We will be seeing younger son and family on 26 Dec, as arranged; our elder son has just cancelled coming to see us 24-26 Dec and suggested we go and see them in Swindon sometime in January. His wife does not have the best of health, she has an auto-immune illness and numerous allergies.

  75. On 21 December 1988, Pan American flight 103, a Boeing 747, took off from London, bound for New York City. As it was climbing on its northerly flight path, it exploded over the town of Lockerbie in the Dumfries and Galloway region of southwest Scotland. In all, 270 people from 21 countries were killed, including all 259 passengers and crewmembers plus 11 people on the ground in Lockerbie.

    The plastic explosive that detonated in the forward cargo hold triggered a sequence of events that led to the rapid destruction of the aircraft. Winds scattered victims and debris along an 81-mile-long corridor 845 square miles in area.

    https://www.cia.gov/legacy/museum/exhibit/terrorist-bombing-of-pan-am-flight-103/

    2. I remember it well, Maggie. At the time I was the General Manager at the Odeon Cinema in Ayr, my marriage had just broken up, and I was having a meal with a couple of friends to celebrate my birthday when the news came in. Reports from later friends in the area told me that one stewardess who survived the crash was seen running around on fire screaming her head off. Horrendous!

      1. It is difficult to believe that anyone who fell from the aircraft or remained strapped to any of its parts survived impact with the ground. As we used to say in the air force, the ground has a PK (probability of kill) of 1.0.

    3. My sister was driving back home to Berwick from Kelso when her & brother in law noted a lot of insulation lying around and coming from the sky that night.

      1. I too was driving past at the time, en route from Glasgow (where I worked) to Bridgend, S Wales (Where my daughter lived) nerve-shattering.

    4. My Mum was on the train from Newcastle, to stay with us for Christmas. Dad came up a couple of days later. Our elder daughter was 2 and I was pregnant with the younger one. I couldn’t take it in then, and still shudder when I drive past Lockerbie.

      1. We stayed in Lockerbie on honeymoon (first marriage) in 1969. Also visited Gretna Green and the Lakes.

    5. The plan was for the device to have detonated when PanAm 103 would have been over the ocean, but departure was delayed.

  76. There is a “woman” who is one of those poor benighted souls who were born on the shortest day.
    Creatures of darkness they are, like my now passed father-in-law.
    You know who you are…

    Happy birthday tomorrow, may all your crumbles and marmalades be delicious, may your axe remain sharp, and may you prosper!

        1. I always do, and am so grateful when Rastus & Caroline advise all NoTTLers the night before and they respond with good wishes as the day arrives. So thank you all, in advance.

      2. Only happens one a year – an excellent opportunity to celebrate that you exist. Don’t dodge it!

  77. How much more can Trudeau do to embaras Canada?

    a spokesperson for Hamas thanked the Liberal government following Canada’s vote in favour of a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war.

    “We welcome these developments and consider them in the right direction towards isolation of the fascist Israeli government globally and ending the long evil occupation in our modern time,”

    2. You should know by now, Maggie, that the RSPB is all about woke. The birds come a long way down the pecking order (or they wouldn’t be so keen on “green” energy bird choppers).

          2. Quite right, Sir Jasper. Keep your private conversations just as they should be, private. And I’m glad to see that you both are back to talking. Hope you are indeed back on track.

  83. Well chums, it’s just turned 10.30 pm so I’m off the wooden stairs to Bedfordshire. See you all tomorrow. I hope you have a good night’s restful sleep, especially Uncle Bill Thomas.

    1. Just popped in and see it’s Elsie’s birthday on the shortest day!
      Very Happy Birthday to you, Elsie, hope it’s a good one, cheers!!

    2. Dear Rastus and Caroline, thank you both for your birthday wishes. I’m particularly pleased with your comments. After thinking of “76 trombones” two years ago and “77 Sunset Strip” last year I thought there was no special way to celebrate my years today. But you cleverly remembered the “old shellac gramophone record” reference which has absolutely delighted me.

      By the way, Olaf and Harry Lime have already sent me birthday greetings in the form of a Jacquie Lawson card each. Harry even signed his “from Santa”! Lol.

  85. 379578+ up ticks,

    An, I wonder pillow ponder,

    ·Stef Anthony Coburn 🗣 reposted
    Paul e 💙 Boycott Digital IDs & CBDCs or face DOOM
    @PaulAqua2
    ·
    Dec 19
    Strange how Jacinda Adhern had to resign and leave NZ in a hurry! I wonder if it’s got anything to do with mass jab fatalities the explosion in excess deaths and the Globelist Genocide WEF cult she follows?

    https://x.com/PaulAqua2/status/1737214305194402117?s=20

      3. Political insider and right-wing commentator Cameron Slater published an article ten days ago

        saying that out of all the politicians he has known (and he has known most since Muldoon

        in the 70s) Ardern is the only one he rates as truly evil.

    2. She did not have to leave New Zealand in a hurry and she will return there to live once she has completed her time at Harvard. I have little doubt, though, that she will secure a plum job on the international stage before very long because she is revered by those who run global organisations. Imagining she will face any serious consequences back in NZ for the way she and her government handled Covid-19 and the vaccination programme is just wishful thinking. By the way, how many “jab fatalities” both official and unofficial, has New Zealand experenced? “Mass” is a bit vague.

      1. 379641+ up ticks,

        Morning DW,
        THere are two schools of thought, as with the likes of anthony charlie lynton & the harmon woman, both being revered in certain quarters.

        What greatly surprises me, one who finds their types highly odious, is the fact their likes are still able to operate
        in open society without some form of rough justice being seen to be done.

        Very sad to say but we are currently
        living through a period of “no holds barred” also sad to say that the gun, the knife, the bomb, or the users of such have no conscience.

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